On Instagram, the hashtag “Selfstaging” is interpreted very generously and not least used by women who look into the camera for a hundred and twenty-fifth of a second as friendly as is common practice when being photographed.

It is quite possible that they already see their smile as a staging.

How much more serious the term is in art and how much more use is made there has been evidence for more than half a century of what is simply called feminist photography.

Freddie Langer

Editor in the features section, responsible for the “Reiseblatt”.

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Since the end of the Second World War, women artists have reacted as models, cinematographers and directors in one person with oppressive visual metaphors to their externally determined role and their search for ways of self-liberation, which sometimes led them to the limit of self-destruction.

In oppressive productions, they tied up, wrapped up or twisted their bodies in response to the dictates of the ideal of beauty in a male-dominated world.

In the 1960s and 1970s in particular, the rebellion against pigeonholed expectations and the fight for equality gained momentum.

The laceration of one's own naked body was at the same time the most brutal possible attack on the art world, which the artist group Guerrilla Girls condemned with shocking statistics at the end of the 1980s.

According to this, in the modern art department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, fewer than three percent of the exhibiting artists were women, but eighty-three percent of the nudes were female.

Which led her to the provocative question of whether women have to be naked to enter this museum.

The negation of eroticism became a weapon of women.

Instead, they were concerned with sexuality and gender.

"Playing it safe" was one of Jenny Holzer's "Truisms", "can do a lot of damage."

The model student of Helsinki

“Self-staging” plays a major role in photography again today, and there may be practical as well as emotional reasons why it is primarily women who act in front of and with the camera at the same time in order to look for ways of expressing their sensitivities.

One of the best-known among them is the graduate of the legendary “Helsinki School” Elina Brotherus, to whom the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt is now dedicating her largest solo exhibition in Germany to date.

With works from a quarter of a century, the picture show covers the broad spectrum of a work that is strictly divided into two parts, the abrupt change of which cannot be recognized by the viewer of the recordings.

Because throughout her career, Elina Brotherus mainly photographs herself.

But while these were initially clearly autobiographical self-portraits, in 2004 she decided to only regard herself as a model for her and other artistic ideas.

So while here she allows insights into her emotional balance in intimate self-questioning, there she slips into alien roles and refers to ideas of art and art history.

However, the approaches come together in one picture: in the motif “Disobedience”, a double portrait for which she poses in the studio together with the Austrian performance artist Valie Export and paraphrases their work “Stand Up, Sit Down”.

Because even if the recording fits seamlessly into Elina Brotherus' current performance series with instructions from the world of Fluxus and Dada, by Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik or the "One Minute Sculptures", which she performs with Erwin Wurm, one cannot help but feel in the picture with Valie Export a moment of reverence for an artist whose work plays a decisive role in women's struggle for their equal position in society and in the arts.

It is not least the shoulders of this giantess that Elina Brotherus stands for.